As a school leader, managing your school’s enrollment is a hard and, sometimes, lonely job — and there never seems to be enough time to get everything done.
Often, your colleagues at the school don’t understand the impact of your school’s enrollment numbers on the financial well-being of your school. And even if they do, they have few opportunities to collaborate or even understand how they can help make a positive difference in student recruitment.
The good news is student recruitment doesn’t have to be a solo job.
Far from it.
With the right approach, you can encourage your faculty to play a larger role in your school’s enrollment efforts.
Understandably, a teacher’s time can be hard to come by. But because your faculty represents the heart and soul of your school, they can be a huge asset as you are trying to attract (and retain) students.
Here are four easy things you can do to teach your faculty to become more engaged and help bolster your student recruitment efforts.
Parents want to know that the people teaching their children are qualified, smart teachers. They trust that they are going to help that child grow both academically and socially over the next year. But most parents know very little about the teachers at your school.
Therefore, your faculty should be the “stars” of your student recruitment efforts.
How great would it be the next time you talk to a parent about why they chose your school and they respond by citing some specific and positive attributes of your excellent faculty?
Plus, showcasing your faculty and including them in your marketing efforts is almost a guaranteed way to engage them and have them feel some ownership of attracting students to your school.
Your first step is to make sure you have compiled bios on all your teachers. These should be a mix of things that establish the quality of your teachers:
Your next step is to make sure you have a faculty section on the website where you can publish all of your staff’s biographies.
Here is a great example from the Clairbourn School in California:
You’d be surprised at how few schools do this — or instead have the section full of incomplete or missing information.
Providing this inside information can increase interest in your school because it enables parents who are “shopping” your school to see your strong and varied instructional staff. It can even provide a competitive edge.
Once you have your staff’s information compiled and on your website, it’s very easy to use this content to create a series of social media postings.
Keeping up with the constant need to post material on social media is challenging for every school. But laying a solid foundation with these bios buys you a lot of content you can use year after year.
Consider doing a “Teacher Tuesday” or a “Faculty Friday” series of posts where you post the bios on your social media channels. If you have a monthly or weekly newsletter, this would be fantastic content to feature there as well.
Here is a #TeacherTuesday example from Clark County School District:
Celebrating your staff can also create a powerful community feel for your school. Your faculty might find common bonds with parents, prospective parents, or even students over attending the same university or sharing the same hobby.
You will probably find that parents will engage more with these posts and make comments like “She was an awesome teacher” or “We loved Mrs. Smith!”
Going through this process also allows you to gather some fun facts about your staff that you can use in your marketing. Things like this:
These can be little blurbs on Twitter, but they can also make a great infographic for your enrollment and student recruitment materials.
Parents often read or research suggestions on parenting, particularly for specific phases of their kids’ lives. You only need to do a quick search on parenting blogs to realize that parents are constantly seeking information.
Your instructional staff are your internal subject matter experts in childhood development and education and can be excellent resources.
Set up a simple editorial calendar by asking each of your staff members to write one to two articles a year that you can use across all of your marketing channels. These should be roughly 600–1,200 words — but let the content determine the appropriate length.
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
The options go on and on. You can get more ideas in 20 Ideas for a School Blog.
Don’t dictate to your staff what they write but instead give them creative freedom based upon questions parents are asking about. I’m sure many of your staff would love to offer suggestions and advice based on their expertise.
Let them!
Once you have compiled several articles (blog posts), you now have a ton of content that you can use for your school’s marketing efforts.
These can be items like lead magnets (articles on your website that are used to identify prospects) or social media posts. You can also use this content in a weekly/monthly newsletter, just to support parents by providing a valuable resource.
The personal touches in your student recruitment are often going to make big impressions with prospective parents.
When a student tours your school (and you’ve collected their contact information), as part of your follow-up process, have one of the teachers who will be working with that child in the upcoming year write a short personal note thanking them for coming and describing a little bit about what the next year will look like.
This doesn’t have to be a long letter, but it is much more about the thought and the fact the teacher personally reached out to the prospective parent.
Even better, if the student expressed interest in your language program, art curriculum, or STEM offerings, have the teacher from that discipline write the note. This personalized approach based upon what the student is interested in will pay huge dividends in your recruitment efforts.
Many schools have the teacher write a note for the new students entering their classroom over the summer, this idea just takes this one step further and expands it to your prospective students.
You can learn more about following up with prospective students and families in my previous article, The Art (and Science) of the Follow Up.
Though this recommendation is primarily designed for your existing students, a strong school enrollment program focuses on the retention of students as well as attracting new students.
Parents love to get visibility into how their child is doing in school. Most parents will check grades, but it is the softer and more emotional development milestones that they don’t hear about as often.
Parents will love you if you ask every teacher to send a short email or, better yet, a handwritten note to the parents, saying something like, “I wanted to let you know what a pleasure it is to have Alex in my class. He is such a good helper and is always a friend to the other kids.”
You better believe that note is going on the refrigerator at home and will maybe even spur positive conversations around the dinner table.
As every parent can attest, as kids get older, it gets harder and harder to draw out what happened at school that day. Having these as conversation starters can help to improve the communication between the parent and their child as well.
Plus, these small notes help to show to the student that there are adults in their life that care. Establishing that feeling in a child is one of the greatest ways to encourage engagement in school.
Of course, your teachers’ time is understandably limited, so this doesn’t need to be for every student, every week, but try to encourage your staff to do it at least quarterly for each student.
Your faculty can be a “secret weapon” in your school recruitment activities. Using their influence and their knowledge can provide an impactful lift to your marketing and recruiting efforts.
It can be difficult to get your staff engaged because they are all busy doing their own job. But helping them understand that sustaining and boosting enrollment provides job security and helps to ensure the financial health of your school may inspire action in even the most reluctant of staff members.
These four steps are all fairly small things that shouldn’t take a huge time commitment from any single staff member.
Collectively, though, they can have a very positive impact on how both prospective and current parents perceive your school and your school community, ideally resulting in a boost to your student recruitment numbers.
How do you get teachers and faculty involved in your student enrollment efforts? Leave a comment below to let us know.
For more information on student recruitment and enrollment marketing, view our full archive here.